Balancing Act
by Wisecrack Idiots
Summary: Being the designated stalwart hero of the land is a demanding job with no sick days and a shitty life insurance plan. The goblins, glorified fetch quests, interracial political backstabbing, and a banished princess with an agenda of her own aren't making it any easier. TP one-shots.


All right, first chapter's up! It's nothing overly impressive since it's walking the fine line between fanfic and novelization, but I really wanted to write the scene where Link first discovers he's a wolf and emphasize just how fucked up that is in-context. The game doesn't do it justice. _No one_ reacts that well to finding out they just got turned into a dog.

* * *

 **Chapter 1: Nodus Tollens**

Before Link saw the tarnished steel bars of his cell, or heard the hollow trickle of water spilling from a drainage pipe, he _smelled_.

The stagnant, musty air was suffocating with each breath that pooled into his lungs. It reeked of damp soil and cobblestone, and it left him with the indescribable sensation of being trapped under the earth. Hundreds and hundreds of ambient microscents screamed at him, vying for his attention, a cacophony of stale water and weathered rust and blood, old and fresh.

The world was deafening and blinding all at once. A wave of nausea rolled through Link, and he had to fight down the urge to vomit. He swallowed, exhaled past his lips, counting the seconds between each breathe before inhaling again. It was a trick that Rusl liked to swear by whenever he went drinking after work. It was a trick that Uli liked to swear about when she'd have to wash the carpet in the river the next morning.

It worked, and the bile settled, though the heaviness in his lungs and acute headache had yet to subside. His head still felt like a world on fire, colored in acrid tangs and chemicals like he'd just walked past Coro's kerosene distillery. His nostrils _burned_.

Link wondered, somewhat inanely, if he'd been drugged.

It wasn't an impossibility; highwaymen preferred ranged attacks over direct confrontations, and the more notorious groups had a penchant for tranquilizers. News that bled into Ordon occasionally included dispatches about marauding bandits, though they'd never been a local problem before since they never ventured any further into Faron past the spring—

—the spring—

" _It'll be all right, Epona. I'll take you to the forest spring."_

Link remembered the children screaming as arrows split their skin.

His eyes flew open, and he immediately recoiled from the torchlight and how sensitive his eyes were to it. Black spots erupted across his vision, and he sucked in a breath. A concussion he hadn't noticed before sent a fresh wave of pain across the back of his head. This time, with a little more caution, Link opened his eyes.

And felt a burst of panic beat through his chest.

The sconces on the adjacent wall cast flickering shadows across the bars of a cell. He lay in a sparse, three-sided room, with a bed of hay in one corner. No other sign of life apart from the dried rat droppings in the corners that smelled a few days old, and _gods_ , how did he _know_ that?

His eyes darted to the torch again, and this time, he couldn't stop himself from gasping at the gray-yellow quality of the flames. It was as if someone had sucked the orange out of the fire. It burned a sickly ashen color that blinking repeatedly did nothing to fix.

Drugged _and_ captured. Link stifled a snort.

Some representative he made.

Lying here was wasting time. His thoughts darted to Ilia, to Colin, to the other children on the outskirts of the village that might not have been fast enough to outrun the Bulblins. Someone put him in this dungeon, and someone was going to come back for him eventually. Either to give him rations, or interrogate him.

Or to kill him.

Link didn't dwell on that thought. A mind half-delirious with pain considered whether or not he could hide in the hay, and ambush his warden when he came back. Make it look like he escaped the room, and trick the Bulblin into lowering its guard. A flimsy plan, perhaps, but a far cry better than lying naked on a stone floor.

Carefully, he braced his hands against the floor and pushed himself up, only to feel a momentary confusion when the action brought him no higher than two feet off the ground. He swung his head down to stare at his hands.

 _They were paws._

All traces of lucidity came rushing back in a cold, wrenching gasp for air. Link jerked back at the sight, and a manacle he hadn't noticed dug into his leg, the strain nearly unbalancing him in the same motion. He swung his head over his shoulders instead, gaping at the horizontal slope of his spine and the bottlebrush tail that hung between his legs. Dark gray fur—interrupted by paler patches—covered his body.

There was a vacuum where his stomach should have been.

This time, Link couldn't stop himself from vomiting. The contents of his last meal spilled onto the bricks, and the heightened sense of smell filled his nostrils with the reek of bile. He gagged, choking on the stench, and retched again, his muscles twisting in on themselves with the effort it took. Seconds passed until he could do little more than dry heave, even when his throat felt singed from the acid.

Exhaustion won out, and Link staggered far enough away to collapse without sitting in his own emesis. The chains clattered over the tiles as he thumped his muzzle onto the floor, basking in the cool stone pressed against his cheek.

This wasn't some half-baked delusion from a drug, or the side effects of fatigue and dehydration. He'd been cursed. Mutated. Spirited away by some nameless malevolence.

A phantom urge to vomit passed over him, and Link shuddered, the hairs along his haunches briefly standing on end.

His first instinct was to try and remember when he'd—when he'd—when _it_ happened ( _don't say it don't say it_ ), and there was nothing there. Just a fog where the memories should have been. He remembered being clubbed, and then…nothing. Well, not exactly "nothing"—he remembered the sensation of wooden planks bouncing under his feet and harsh, amber light, but there weren't any images to connect the displaced sensations to. Gods only knew what became of the others.

Link whined, a thin, doleful sound that threaded past his lips.

He needed to get free. Link turned his head, enough to glare at the metal bindings anchored to the dungeon floor.

Wol— _this form_ had sharp teeth, right? Sharp enough to saw through the chains? It was a shot. If nothing else, it gave him a plan of action.

Link stood. More accurately, he _tried_ to stand, and immediately stumbled under the unfamiliar weight displacement of his quadrupedal stance. He snarled in frustration, only to clamp his jaws shut at the feral sound. It was unsettling, to hear the noise of an animal that regularly preyed on the goat herds, and realize it was coming from _him_.

He desperately tried to banish the thought. It remained, like a loose tooth being prodded with his tongue.

Link padded toward the chains, lowering his chin to the floor and bumping his snout into the metal. There was a second of hesitation where he thought about how stupid this plan actually was, before he decided that he liked his _teeth intact_ a lot less than he liked being _free_.

Link bit into the steel, hard. Pain lanced through the nerves in his teeth, a sharp, electric ache each time he whittled at the chain. A few scratches in the metal's surface, but nothing more. The fear that this was futile, that he was going to stay trapped, jolted through him, and he shook the binds back and forth.

He didn't want to die down here.

Minutes droned on into hours until Link had no idea how long he'd been down there, gnawing at the chains. With no light apart from the muted glow of the fire, he had no way of gauging the hour. Precious seconds slipped past as he fruitlessly tore at the restraints. At some point he must have pulled too hard and broken skin on his ankle, because he could smell the iron-rich tang. It perfumed the air around him, dizzying him occasionally and at one point, causing him to salivate. That scared him more than anything, the involuntary reactions from his body he had no way of controlling.

Link remembered Bo once telling him a story about a snare-trap he'd left in the woods. When he'd returned the next day, he'd found the trap sprung and a leg nearby, matted with sinew and ginger fur. The fox had bitten its leg off in order to escape. Reluctantly, Link gave his own shackled limb a pensive glance, resignation settling in his gut.

His ears twitched.

Link snapped his head toward the wall behind him.

A creature no taller than himself regarded him. Its body was swirled in partially symmetric blacks and whites, with a collage of tattoos spiraling across its arms and legs. A horned and sinister-looking helmet crested its head, one part dipping down to obscure an eye. What looked like hair shorn from plasma draped over the rim of the helmet. It studied him a moment longer before it grinned, bright and wide and vicious, a lone tooth jutting out from beneath its lips.

In a moment that was over before it began, the imp jumped.

Link whipped his head toward the cage door to see it land, its petite and graceful form virtually weightless on the tiles.

" _Nee-tuh!_ " it exclaimed. Its voice had a feminine quality to it. Link growled, and for a moment she seemed puzzled by his reaction. Some realization dawned on her, and she clarified, this time in Hylian. "I found you!"

Link bared his teeth. Rather than take the threat for what it was, she gave a tinkly laugh. "Oooh! Aren't you scary?" Her bright gaze flitted to the coagulating puddle of vomit a ways off, and she crinkled her nose. "Are you sure you want to be doing that? Snarling and glaring at me?"

Link didn't move. His muscles tensed. For all he knew, she was affiliated with his captors. He bided, waiting to see if she'd attack.

The imp folded her arms over her chest and sighed. "Well, that's too bad. I was planning on helping you…if you were nice."

That caught his attention. Link lifted his head, the snarls subsiding to a discontent rumble in the back of his throat.

She cackled, eyes alight with some secret joke only she knew. "That's much better. You humans are obedient to a fault, aren't you?" She leaned forward and patted the underside of his snout. "Oops. But you _aren't_ a human anymore, are you? You're a beast!"

He lunged.

She darted back with her arms fanned out, her expression largely unchanged from its taunting glee. "There, there," she simpered. "You be a good boy and calm down. No need to bite!"

Link didn't know what to expect. A _retaliation_ certainly wasn't it, not after she'd promised to help him. The imp moved her arms in front of her chest, palms cupping the air in front of her. Energy crackled in the space between them. Her fingers curled in on the sphere, compressing and condensing it, before she discharged it in a shower of particles. The magic hit before Link could dodge, but instead of injuring him, it impacted the chain. With a metallic _snap_ the chain link broke.

Link studied the paw in mixture of wonder and trepidation. Old village folk stories spoke of magic, and the many destructive side effects one experienced when coming into contact with it. Up until now he'd never considered whether or not the radiation poisoning was a joke, and he hastily sniffed at the paw.

The imp's grinning expression came into view, and Link jumped back. "You look kind of surprised! Never seen magic before, I bet. The world's a lot bigger than you ignorant humans pretend otherwise."

As if to prove her point she hopped backward. Then, in a graceful twist of her body, sprang up into the air and _floated_. Link watched as her form began to bubble at the edges, as if she was transitioning between phases of matter.

"So!" she said, looking as if flying and melting were perfectly normal things to do. "I bet you're wondering, where exactly are we?" Her form dissolved in a spray of particles, and she moved through the cell bars, resolidifying on the other side. "Well, I'll make you a deal. If you can get over here, maybe I'll tell you!"

She beckoned him with a slender hand.

The prospect of freedom bypassed his self-preservation instincts, but not his suspicions. Link stared, his brain still struggling with making sense of this rapid development.

 _I found you._

She'd been looking for him. Why?

The manacle still fastened around his leg pressed cold into his skin. He'd been captured, not killed, meaning that he was more valuable to his captors alive than dead. The imp must have felt the same way, or she would've killed him rather than go through the effort of severing his binds. She clearly had the raw power to kill him, and gods knew what else.

What use was a farmhand to a creature skilled in arcane arts?

The thought that Link might have been captured for slavery didn't escape him. That he was just cargo put in a holding cell between destinations, and she was raiding their stock. The imp certainly seemed sadistic enough to enjoy keeping slaves, if her condescending attitude and blatant disregard for other living things were anything to go by.

Earning his cooperation could've just been her way of orchestrating his "escape" more easily. But it still didn't explain his appearance. His ears flattened against his head. He…didn't know what to think.

"Oh come on!" Evidently, she'd grown impatient, or was interpreting his silence as confusion rather than wariness. "Look, I get it, having your corporeal form altered can be disorienting. I'm sure there are plenty of things that are taking some getting used to."

Being able to see a limited range of color was overwhelming, sure. Never mind his newfound olfaction, which for the moment he was desperately trying to ignore. He hated her scent the most thus far—something that he had yet to find words for.

"I'm sure this is inconvenient for you, but not _nearly_ as much as it is for me. You want me to give you some advice?"

He really wanted to tell her where she could go shove that advice.

"You're not some fragile human anymore! Don't get me wrong, this is still a downgrade, but we play the cards we're dealt. You got some trade-offs to work with. Now stop thinking like a human and start thinking like a wolf."

A wolf. Link glanced at his paws again, the one reminder in all of this that this wasn't some lucid dream. The life he'd had before was gone. His home. His friends.

He remembered Epona's frantic screaming and Colin's shout for help. He remembered how he couldn't protect them.

The imp canted her head in unspoken query.

Link's tail lashed back and forth as he paced the perimeter of his cell, straining for any evidence of a way out. All the while he could feel the imp's stare trained on him. More than likely, she'd already deduced the answer and was waiting to see how it'd take him to figure it out. It gave him the eerie impression of being assessed.

He nosed along the crates piled in the corner and earned a splinter for his efforts. He nearly drew back until he detected the scent of air ventilating underneath, and a stronger presence of oxidative corrosion.

Link shoved aside the crate, surprised to see one of the bars broken by rust and a shallow depression in the floor. Gingerly, he slid his belly along the ground, careful to avoid slicing open his back as he partly dug, partly squirmed through the opening.

Flecks of dirt flew from his fur as he gave his pelt a brisk shake.

The imp's laughter reverberated off the dungeon walls. That was all the warning he got before a solid weight landed squarely on his back.

Link barked, and proceeded to buck her off, spinning in erratic circles the same way Epona used to when trying to dislodge someone. She held fast.

"Hmpf! I guess you're not completely stupid after all!" The pain in his leg from where the manacle was chafing finally stopped him. Link slowed and tossed his head back. Completely at ease, she straddled him, one hand braced against his shoulder while the other idly combed through the fur on his nape. She slid forward, the friction along his back causing his skin to crawl. "Listen, I like you, so I think I'll get you out of here."

A hand snaked forward and pulled his ear back, brushing against the earring that he hadn't realized was still there. The imp leaned in, close enough that when she spoke, he felt the curve of her lips against his ear. "But in exchange for my help," she whispered, "you have to do _exactly_ as I say." He felt her smile. "It's your choice."

It was the first of many lies to come.

* * *

Turns out wolves have meh eyesight when it comes to the visible light spectrum. They have two-color vision (dichromacy), so they can really only perceive muted yellow, tan, blue, gray, black, and white. On the other hand, their olfaction is incredible. I imagine someone who spent their entire life living as human and then getting to experience the full breadth of that sense would be understandably overwhelmed.


End file.
